Dan Swaim and a photo of his late grandmother Elsie Moren who was stripped of her American citizenship back in 1914--he fights to have her citizenship restored...in the dining room of his Minneapolis home March 22, 2013. (Pioneer Press: John Doman)

If you think immigration laws are screwy now, I have a little story to tell you.

Dan Swalm is the grandson of the late Elsie Moren (nee Knutson) of Two Harbors, Minn. Moren, an Iron Range native, was stripped of her American citizenship on her wedding day in 1914. She would die — 12 years later after childbirth — as “a woman without a country,” Swalm told me last week.

Her crime? She fell in love and married a Swedish immigrant carpenter by the name of Carl Moren. That was the price millions of American women paid under a law passed in 1907 that was enacted partly in response to an anti-immigrant fervor against arrivals from eastern and southern Europe at the time. You can boil it down to a common thread seen throughout the history of immigration legislation: fear of the outsider.

Now, nearly 100 years later, Swalm is on a quixotic mission to right a wrong for Grandma Elsie, a woman he never met. He is seeking to persuade Congress to either posthumously restore his grandmother’s citizenship or at least officially acknowledge that their predecessors committed a gross miscarriage of justice against American-born women 106 years ago.

“Grandma Elsie long went up to heaven and is playing the golden harp, so people might wonder why should I care?” said Swalm, 60, executive director of Career Solutions, a St. Paul-based nonprofit that provides mostly poor and low-income women with job and career guidance.

“But down here we have an obligation to the past,” Swalm said. “When we uncover an injustice like this, we have an obligation to those people in the past to do what we can to do what is right and seek justice in their memory.”

1907 LAW AFFECTED MANY

I had never heard of this discriminatory provision of the Expatriation Act of 1907. Neither had Swalm until two years ago, when he visited the Iron Range Genealogy Center in Chisholm, Minn., as part of his effort to research his family tree. He came upon an “Alien Registration and Declaration” form filled out and signed by his grandmother in 1918.

The form asked whether she owned property, if she had sold or transferred any property after the U.S. declared war on Germany and the Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria) in 1917, and to what country she claimed allegiance. No and the U.S. were her replies. But Swalm was confused why she was required to submit to such a form.

Elsie, of Swedish heritage, was born in 1891 in Skibo Township, north of Duluth. An accomplished carpenter, Carl Moren came to America and Minnesota in 1911 and worked at the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway yards in Two Harbors. The two dated, married and began to raise a family in a one-bedroom home no larger than a small trailer.

The form led Swalm to dig a little more and discover the 1907 legislation. The more he read, “the madder I got,” he said. The law, among several other restrictive provisions, declared, “any American woman who marries a foreigner shall take the nationality of her husband.”

By adding the marital provision to the law, the 59th Congress essentially “denationalized or denaturalized every woman who married an alien,” wrote University of North Carolina Wilmington professor Candace Bredbenner in her book, “A Nationality Of Her Own: Women, Marriage and the Law of Citizenship” (University of California Press, 1998).

PROPERTY SEIZED

At the same time, federal law granted citizenship to foreign-born women who married American men. Indeed, when women were granted the right to vote in 1920, those women could go to the polls and cast a ballot. But disenfranchised, American-born women like Grandma Elsie could not.

Loss of the right to vote was not the only adverse consequence of a law that undoubtedly would be ruled unconstitutional today. According to Bredbenner, such women could be excused or expelled from the U.S., denied access to or terminated from certain occupations like public school teaching and were ineligible for public assistance programs.

“The situation only worsened during World War I, when the government classified women as ‘alien enemies’ if their spouses were citizens of the Central Powers,” Bredbenner noted in her book. “These women received a shocking lesson in the perils of (alien designation) when the Alien Property Custodian (office) confiscated their property.”

The women’s suffrage movement helped spur calls for reform. Some citizenship restrictions were lifted through the Cable Act of 1922. But it kept intact the permanent loss of citizenship of American-born women of color other than blacks who married foreigners ineligible for naturalization. Neither divorce nor widowhood could restore their citizenship rights.

FRANKEN: ‘WOW’

Swalm’s deceased mother, Margret, was 8 years old when his grandmother died in 1926 after she gave birth to her fourth child, Glenn, who also did not survive. Carl Moren, who was a pacifist during World War I and a temperance movement supporter, raised Margret and two sons. Denied three times, he finally was allowed to become a U.S. citizen in 1928, two years after his wife’s death. He remarried in 1944.

The Cable law, as well as two other immigration reform laws passed in 1934 and 1940, eventually repealed the loss of citizenship through marriage to a foreigner. But they were not retroactive.

In her book, Bredbenner recounts the story of Lillian Larch, an illiterate, American-born woman and mother of five who married a Canadian in 1917 and thereby lost her citizenship under the 1907 law. The family moved to Canada but returned to the U.S. on visitors’ visas in 1926. Her husband died five years later at a hospital in Detroit. Deportation proceedings were launched after officials learned the family was receiving public assistance. Immigration officials gave the widow, who had $1.50 to her name, and her children one day to prepare for deportation to Ontario.

The story hit the newspapers, “but the most disturbing public revelation about the incident was the fact that Lillian Larch was an American-born woman,” Bredbenner wrote.

Swalm has been working with staffers at the office of U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., to do something for “my grandmother and other women like her,” he said.

Spokesman Marc Kimball said Franken let out a “wow” when he learned of the 1907 law as well as Swalm’s quest.

On Friday, Swalm received the following missive from the Minnesota junior senator’s staff:

“Senator Franken intends to introduce a resolution in the Senate expressing the sense of the Senate that what happened to your grandmother and numerous other women was wrong and should not happen again.

“It will also emphasize the contributions that immigrants like your grandfather have made to our society,” the directive added. “It will use your grandparents as an example but speak to the experiences of everyone who was in their position.”

“Unbelievable.” Swalm said. “I am very awed and humbled that this is actually happening!”

You go, Grandma Elsie, albeit more than a half-century later. Righting a long-ago wrong and making sure it doesn’t happen again has no timeline.

From smoking crack in a Harlem drug den for a front-page exposé to covering the deaths of 86 people in a Bronx social club fire, Rubén Rosario spent 11 years as a writer for the New York Daily News before joining the Pioneer Press in 1991 as special correspondent and city editor. He launched his award-winning column in 1997. He is by far the loudest writer in the newsroom over the phone.

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